The fastest scaling tech company in Southeast Asia
About Grab
Grab - one of the fastest growing tech companies in Southeast Asia - started as a ride-hailing company and quickly became the region's leading superapp for "Everyday Everything." You can hail a ride, order a meal, make financial transactions, and more. The company has lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty by creating "everyday entrepreneurs" - people who make a living selling their goods and services on Grab's platform. As a result, Grab has become the premier magnet for Southeast Asia's hottest talent.
The Challenge
By 2020, Grab was growing fast and wanted to ensure it stayed nimble. Specifically, Grab wanted to make it easy for colleagues in every team, in every business unit, in every region to stay aligned with the company’s increasingly complex strategy while also customizing solutions to local needs – all while maintaining a high pace of delivery.
Grab was scaling fast, and wanted to get ahead of the challenges fast-scaling tech companies often experience by:
- Promoting cross-functional collaboration. Too often, siloes and a lack of collaboration create redundancies and inefficiencies.
- Connecting all colleagues to user problems. Being disconnected from customers results in demotivation and inefficiencies in product design and delivery.
- Engaging teams in collaborative problem solving. As most organizations grow, a waterfall approach to development slows down delivery and thus threatens trust-building efforts in new markets.
- Crafting a clear "north star" for every locality and business unit. Lack of strategic clarity makes prioritization difficult and leads to waste.
To address these challenges, Grab partnered with Vega Factor, leveraging the support of Factor AI and the science of total motivation (“tomo”) to undergo a transformative journey.
The Impact
After just one year, Grab’s transformation efforts yielded profound results:
- "Total motivation helps Grab make our mission real every day, to drive Southeast Asia forward with economic empowerment." - Anthony Tan, CEO
- “Factor creates breadth, depth, and lightness. As a leader, I get to coach my team on more topics in greater depth – while attending fewer meetings.” – Rashid Shukor, Director of Country Operations, Malaysia
- "Our work with Vega Factor showed that if you give a team ownership over a problem space, and they are able to work effectively together, and they are able to formulate a strategy based on clear, agreed upon principles, then they will work with better speed and efficiency and produce better quality output." - Liam Harris, Head Economist
- "Goals and priorities can change fast. Factor gives people a sense of focus and purpose in their work that's super energizing." – A-Young Kim, Head of Learning & Development
The Solution
Our transformation work with Grab included:
- C-suite workshops and coaching to define the future of the company
- Leadership masterclasses for the top 100 executives
- Strategic vision definition with critical business units so that leaders and individual contributors had a clear thesis for how the business would win over the next three years, and why that matters for customers’ lives
- High-performance transformations of specific business units, including Product, Engineering, Sales, and Operations
- Training for 500 managers on leadership and cross-silo problem solving
To support the above, the Factor AI platform was essential for:
- Teaching the core principles of adaptive performance
- Measuring motivation, diagnosing root cause performance issues, and instantly providing AI-generated guidance
- Scaling programs and solutions efficiently
- Sustaining the transformation for years beyond the initial implementation
Total motivation and adaptive performance are now intertwined in Grab's DNA, and Factor is a core piece of how leaders manage high-performing teams.
